WHEN Guy looked back next morning at what had happened on the river, he felt that the only thing to do was to leave Pauline for a while and give her time and opportunity to recover from the shock. He wondered if it would be wiser merely to write a note to announce his intention or if she had now reached a point at which even a letter would be a disastrous aggravation of her state of mind. He felt that he could not bear any scene that might approximate to that horrible scene last night, and yet to go away abruptly in such circumstances seemed too callous. Supposing that he went across to the Rectory and that Pauline should have another seizure of hatred for him (there was no other word that could express what her attitude had been), how could their engagement possibly go on? Mrs. Grey would be appalled by the emotional ravages it had made Pauline endure: she would not be justified, whatever Pauline's point of view, in allowing the engagement to last a day longer. It would be surely wiser to write a letter and with all the love he felt explain that he thought she would be happier not to see him for a short while. Yet such a course might provoke her to declare the whole miserable business, and the false deductions that might be made from her account were dreadful to contemplate. He blamed himself entirely for what had happened, and yet he could scarcely have foreseen such a violent change. Even now he could not say what exactly had begun the outburst, and indeed the only explanation of it was by a weight of emotion that had been accumulating for months. Of course he should never have persuaded her to come out on the river at night, but still that he had done so was only a technical offence against convention. It was she who had magnified her acquiescence beyond any importance he could have conceived. He must thank religion for that, he must thank that poisonous fellow in the confessional who had first started her upon this ruinous path of introspection and self-torment. But, whatever the cause, it was the remedy that demanded his attention, and he twisted the situation round and round without being able to decide how to act. He realized how month by month his sense of responsibility for Pauline had been growing, yet now the problem of her happiness stared at him, brutally insoluble. What was it Margaret had once said about his being unlikely to squander Pauline for a young man's experience? Good God, had not just that been the very thing he had nearly done; and then with a shudder remembering last night, he wondered if he ought any longer to say 'nearly.' He must see her. Of course he must see her this morning. He must somehow heal the injury he had inflicted upon her youth.

Pauline was very gentle when they met. She had no reproaches except for herself and the way she had frightened him.

"Oh, my Pauline, can't you forget it?" he begged. "Let me go away for a month or more. Let me go away till Margaret and Richard are going to be married."

She acquiesced half-listlessly, and then seeming to feel that she might have been cold in her manner, she wished him a happy holiday from her moods and jealousy and exacting love. He tried to pierce the true significance of her attitude, because it held in its heart a premonition for him that everything between them had been destroyed last night, and that henceforth whatever he or she did or said they would meet in the future only as ghosts may meet in shadowy converse and meaningless communion.

"You will be glad to see me when I come back?" he asked.

"Why, my dearest, of course I shall be glad."

He kissed her good-bye, but her kiss was neither the kiss of lover nor of sister, but such a kiss as ghosts may use, seeking to perpetuate the mere form and outward semblance of life lost irrevocably.

When Guy was driving with Godbold along the Shipcot road, he had not made up his mind where he would go, and it was on the spur of the moment, as he stood in the booking-office, that he decided to go and see his father, to whom latterly he had written scarcely at all and of whom he suddenly thought with affection.

"I've settled to give up Plashers Mead," Guy told him that night, when they were sitting in the library at Fox Hall.

"And try and get on the staff of a paper," he added to his father's faint bow. "Or possibly I may go to Persia as Sir George Gascony's secretary. My friend Comeragh got me the offer in March, but Sir George was ill and did not start."

"That sounds much more sensible than journalism," said Mr. Hazlewood.

"Yes, perhaps it would be better," Guy agreed. "But then of course there is the question of leaving Pauline for two years."

Yet even as he enunciated this so solemnly, he knew in his heart that he would be rather glad to postpone for two years all the vexations of love.

His father shrugged his shoulders.

"My poems are coming out this Autumn," Guy volunteered.

His father gave some answer of conventional approbation, and Guy without the least bitterness recognized that to his father the offer of the secretaryship had naturally presented itself as the more important occasion.

"If you want any help with your outfit...."

"Oh, you mustn't count on Persia," interrupted Guy. "But I'll go up to town to-morrow and ask Comeragh when Sir George is going."

Next day, however, when Guy was in the train, he began to consider his Persian plan a grave disloyalty to Pauline. He wondered how last night he had come to think of it again and fancied it might have been merely an instinct to gratify his father after their coolness. Of course he would not dream of going really, and yet it would have been jolly. Yes, it would certainly have been jolly, and he was rather relieved to find that Comeragh was out of town for a week, for his presence might have been a temptation. Michael Fane was not in London either, so Guy went round to Maurice Avery's studio in Grosvenor Road and in the pleasure of the company he found there the Persian idea grew less insistent. Maurice himself had just been invited to write a series of articles on the English ballet for a critical weekly journal called The Point of View. They went to a theatre together, and Guy as he listened to Maurice's jargon felt for a while quite rustic and was once or twice definitely taken in by it. Had he really been stagnating all this time at Wychford? And then the old superiority which at Oxford he always felt over his friend reasserted itself.

"You're still skating, Maurice," he drawled. "The superficial area of your brain must be unparalleled."

"You frowsty old yokel!" his friend exclaimed laughing.

"I don't believe I shall get much out of breath, catching up with your advanced ideas," Guy retorted. "Anyway this Autumn I shall come to town for good."

"And about time you did," said Maurice. "I say, mind you send your poems to The Point of View, and I'll give you a smashing fine notice the week after publication."

Guy asked when Michael was coming back.

"He's made a glorious mess of things, hasn't he?" said Maurice.

"Oh, I don't know. Not necessarily."

"Well, I admit he found her out in time. But fancy wanting to marry a girl like that. I told him what she was, and he merely got furious with me. But he's an extraordinary chap altogether. By the way when are you going to get married?"

"When I can afford it," said Guy.

"The question is whether an artist can ever afford to get married."

"What rot you talk."

"Wiser men than I have come to that conclusion," said Maurice. "Of course I haven't met your lady-love; but it does seem to me that your present mode of life is bound to be sterile of impressions."

"I don't go about self-consciously obtaining impressions," said Guy a little angrily. "I would as soon search for local colour. Personally I very much doubt if any impressions after eighteen or nineteen help the artist. As it seems to me, all experience after that age is merely valuable for maturing and putting into proportion the more vital experiences of childhood. And I'm not at all sure that there isn't in every artist a capacity for development which proceeds quite independently of externals. I speculate sometimes as to what would be the result upon a really creative temperament of being wrecked at twenty-two on a desert island. I say twenty-two, because I do count as valuable the academic influence that only begins to be effective after eighteen."

"And what is your notion about this literary Crusoe?" asked Maurice.

"Well, I fancy that his work would not suffer at all, that it would ripen, just as certain fruit ripens independently of sun, that he would display in fact quite normally the characteristic growth of the artist."

"But where would he obtain his reaction?" Maurice asked.

"From himself. If that isn't possible for some people I don't see how you're going to make a distinction between literature and journalism."

"Some journalism is literature."

"Only very bad journalism," Guy argued. "The journalistic mind experiences a quick reaction, the creative writer a very slow one. The journalist is affected by extremes: and he is continually aware of the impression they are making at the moment: contrariwise the creative artist is always unaware of the impression at the moment it is made; he feels it from within first and it develops according to his own characteristics. Let me give you an example. The journalist is like a man who, seeing a mosquito in the act of biting him, claps his hand down and kills it. The creative artist isn't aware of having been bitten until he sees the swelling ... big or small according to his constitution. It is his business to cure the swelling, not to bother about the insect."

"Your theories may be all right for great creative artists," said Maurice. "And I suppose you're willing to take the risk of stagnation?"

"I'm not a great creative artist," said Guy quickly. "At the same time I'm damned if I'm a journalist. No, the effect of Plashers Mead on me has been to make me long to be a man of action. So far it has been stimulating, and without external help I've been able to reach the conclusion that my poems were never worth writing.... I wrote because I wanted to: I don't believe I ever had to."

"Then what are you going to do now?" asked Maurice.

"I'm probably going to work in London at journalism."

"Then, great Scott, why all this preliminary tirade against it?"

"Because I don't want to bluff myself into thinking that I'm going to do anything but be a strictly professional writer," said Guy. "Or else perhaps because I don't really want to come and live in London at all, but go to Persia. Dash it all, for the first time in my life, Maurice, I don't know what I do want, and it's a very humiliating state of affairs for me."

When Guy left the studio that evening, he came away with that pleasant warming of the cockles of the brain that empirical conversation always gave. It was really very pleasant to be chattering away about aesthetic theories, to be meeting new people and to be infused with this sense of being joined up to the motive force of a city's life. At his lodgings in Vincent Square a letter from Pauline awaited his return, and with a shock he realized half way through its perusal that he was reading it listlessly. He turned back and tried to bring to its contents that old feverish absorption in magic pages, but something was wanting whether in the letter or whether in himself he did not know. He came to the point of asking himself if he loved her still as much, and almost with horror at the question vowed he loved her more than ever and that of all things on earth he only longed for their marriage. Yet in bed that night he thought more of his argument in the studio than about Pauline, and when he did think about her it was with a drowsy sense of relief. Vincent Square under the bland city moon seemed very peaceful, and in retrospect Wychford a place of endless storms.

Next morning when Guy sat down to answer Pauline's letter he found himself writing with mechanical fluency without really thinking of her at all. In fact for the moment she represented something that disturbed the Summer calm in London, and he consciously did not want to think about her until all this late troublous time had lost its actuality and he could be sure of returning to the Pauline of their love's earlier days.

These shuttlecock letters were tossed backward and forward between Wychford and London throughout the rest of June and most of July, and sometimes Guy thought they were as unreal as his own poetry. He spent his time in looking up old friends, in second-hand book shops, in the galleries of theatres. He did not see Michael Fane, who wrote to him from Rome before Guy knew he had gone there. Comeragh however he saw pretty often, and he enjoyed talking about politics nearly as much as about art. He met Sir George Gascony, and Comeragh assured him afterward that when Sir George went out to Persia in August or September he could if he liked go with him. Guy put the notion at the back of his mind whence he occasionally took it out and played with it. In the end, however, when the definite offer came he refused it. This happened at the end of his visit to London when his money was running out and when he had to be going back to Wychford to live somehow on credit, until the Michaelmas quarter replenished his overdrawn account. Before he left town he paid a visit to Mr. Worrall and told him that he wanted his poems to appear anonymously. In fact if it were not for hurting the Rector's feelings he would have stopped their publication altogether.

At the end of a hot and dusty July and about a week before the Lammas wedding of Margaret and Richard, Guy came back to Plashers Mead. The immediate effect of seeing again the place which was now associated in his mind with interminable difficulties was to make him resolute to clarify the situation once and for all, to clarify it so completely that there could never again be a repetition of that night in June. His absence had been in the strictest sense an interlude, and all the letters which marked to each the existence of the other had been but conventional forms of love and comfortable postponements of reality. When he met Pauline, Guy felt that he met her to all intents directly after that dreadful night, with only this difference that owing to the time they had had for repose he could now say things that six weeks ago he could not have said. He had arrived at Wychford for lunch, and as a matter of course they were to be together that afternoon. Ordinarily on such a piping July day he would have proposed the river for their converse, and it was a sign of how near at hand he felt their last time on the river that he proposed a walk instead.

Guy was aware of wanting to take Pauline to some place that was neither hallowed nor cursed by past hours, and avoiding familiar ways, they reached a barren cup-shaped field shut off from the road by a spinney of firs that offered such a dry and draughty shade as made the field even in the hot sun of afternoon more tolerable. They sat down on the sour stony land among the ragwort and teazles and feverfew. Summer had burnt up this abandoned pasturage, and while they sat in silence Guy rattled from the rank umbels of fools-parsley and hemlock the innumerable seeds that would only profit the rankness of another year.

"Well?" he said at last.

Pauline looked at him questioningly, and he felt impatient to be sitting here on this sour stony land and wondered how for merely this he could have refused that offer of Persian adventure. Not until now had he realized how much he had been resenting the performance of a duty.

"You've hardly told me anything about your time in London," said Pauline.

He looked at her sharply in case this might be a prelude to jealous interrogation.

"There's nothing much to tell. I settled that my poems should appear anonymously. I'm afraid their publication may otherwise do me more harm than good."

"All your poems?" she asked wistfully.

He nodded impelled by a strong desire for absolute honesty, though he would have liked to except the poems about her, knowing how much she must be wounded to hear even them called worthless.

"Then I've been no good to you at all?"

"Of course you have. Because these poems are no good, it doesn't follow that what I write next won't be good. And yet I'm uncertain whether I ought to go on merely writing. I'm beginning to wonder if I oughtn't to have gone out to Persia with Gascony. I refused the job because I thought it would upset you. And so, dearest Pauline, when next you feel jealous, do remember that. Do remember that it is always you who come first. Don't think I'm regretful about Persia. I'm only wondering on your account if I ought to have gone. It would have made our marriage in three years a certainty, but still I hope by journalism to make it certain in one year. Are you glad, my Pauline?"

"Yes, of course I'm glad," she answered without fervour.

"And you won't be jealous of my friends? Because it's impossible to be in London without friends you know."

"I told you I should never be enough."

Guy tried not to be irritated by this.

"If you would only be reasonable! I realize now that for me at my age it's foolish to withdraw from my contemporaries. I shall stagnate. These two years have not been wasted...."

"Yes, they have," she interrupted, "if your poems are not worth your name."

"Dearest, these two years may well be the foundation on which I build all the rest of my life."

"May they?"

"Yes, of course. But a desire for the stimulus of other people isn't the only reason for leaving Plashers Mead. I can't afford it here. My debts are really getting impossible to manage, and unless I can show my father that I'm ready to do anything to be a writer, as I can't go out to Persia, well ... frankly I don't know what will happen. I gave Burrows notice at Midsummer."

"You never told me," said Pauline.

"Well, no, I was afraid you'd be upset and I wanted you to have this quiet time when I was away...."

"You don't trust me any more," she said.

"Oh, yes, I do, but I thought it would worry you. I know my money affairs do worry you. But now I shall be all right. I'll come down here often, you know, and, oh, really, dearest girl, it is better that I should be in London. So don't be jealous, will you, and don't torment yourself about my debts, will you, and don't think that you are anything but everything to me."

"I expect you'll enjoy being in London," she said slowly shredding the flowers from a spray of wild mignonette.

"I hope I shall be so busy that I won't have time to regret Wychford," said Guy.

He had by now broken off all the rank flowers in reach, and the sour stony ground was littered with seeds and pungent heads of bloom and ragged stalks.

"You'll never regret Wychford," she said. "Never. Because I've spoilt it for you, my darling."

She touched his hand gently and drew close to him, but only timidly; and as she made the movement a flight of goldfinches lighted upon the swaying thistle-down in the hollow of the waste land.

"Pauline! Pauline!" he cried and would have kissed her passionately, but she checked him:

"No, no, I just want to lean my head upon your shoulder for a little while."

Above her murmur he heard the rustle of the goldfinches' song in parting cadences upon the air, rising and falling: and looking down at Pauline in the sunlight, he felt that she was a wounded bird he should be cherishing.